Joined: Sat January 1st, 2011, 20:57 GMTPosts: 6816Location: Out in the West Texas town of El Paso

Tom Waits said it best,

Quote:

"People don't really trust people to do two things well. If they're going to spend money, they want to get the guy who's the best at what he does. Otherwise, it's like getting one of those business cards that says about 8 things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure."

Joined: Wed June 6th, 2007, 15:58 GMTPosts: 11475Location: in the land where dreams are made....

mjeff wrote:

It's getting embarrassing really.. just sayin. And keep writing and recording.. the clock is ticking.

I have seen this word 'embarrassing' used before about things that Dylan is doing..... I don't get it..... why would anyone else be embarrassed by anything that someone else is doing...??? By the way, I am sure Dylan is having a good time doing the paintings and is being "embarrassed" all the way to the bank

And we could on and on and on, right up till the just completed tour. People have always tried to find reasons to stop Bob Dylan. Right from day one. Personally, I find the people who say these things, to be embarrassing.

Joined: Sun June 5th, 2011, 06:05 GMTPosts: 6542Location: One Too Many Mornings and 1000 Miles Behind

mjeff wrote:

It's getting embarrassing really.. just sayin. And keep writing and recording.. the clock is ticking.

I've never been particularly impressed with Bob Dylan's artwork in comparison to other Painters, but he's not embarassing himself. Art for Art's sake, why not? If it's what he wants to do with his time, he has every right. He can draw much better than me though for the record...then again, so can a lot of 10 year olds. I can't draw for s**t

I have a few close personal friends though who are amazing artist, so I'm a bit spoiled by seeing their work.

Yes. Just read it. Thanks for pulling it together revelator. Fascinating.If you open your mind and go with it, it makes some sense.Bob giving the finger to the art world with a smile on his face.Funny really.

It certainly is interesting to think about. The fluidity of "Bob Dylan" as an identity has been explicit in Dylan's work since at least Renaldo And Clara (and implicit since practically the beginning). The whole thing seems very "Claire Danes at the bulletin board" to me. The again, Claire Danes was right...

Yes. Just read it. Thanks for pulling it together revelator. Fascinating.If you open your mind and go with it, it makes some sense.Bob giving the finger to the art world with a smile on his face.Funny really.

See, that was a long thing, and you always act like you don't like to read long posts. And, no, don't snark me back. I am ending the snark here. Right....here. OK. Good.

Since when is "snark" a self-defined one-way street?

Anyhow, it was layed out logically, without running on and on. When that happens I can follow with patience.

It's getting embarrassing really.. just sayin. And keep writing and recording.. the clock is ticking.

I have seen this word 'embarrassing' used before about things that Dylan is doing..... I don't get it..... why would anyone else be embarrassed by anything that someone else is doing...??? By the way, I am sure Dylan is having a good time doing the paintings and is being "embarrassed" all the way to the bank

If he wasn't embarrassed by Christmas in the Heart, he won't be embarrassed by anything.

As briefly noted in one of the posted attachments,something similar happened to buyers of Andy Warhol's portrait pieces. Here's a pretty good overview of what's transpired as it relates to the authenticity of Warhol's work. The article is a couple of years old so there may have been some settlements by now but some suits are still pending.

For those who don't want to read the whole article - in a nutshell, Warhol employed many people at The Factory who were on hand to assist with the screenprinting of his oversized canvas'. A collector bought a "Jackie O" (it might be a "Marilyn" piece; I'm not going to take the time to re-read the article). Some years later the collector decided to sell it only to be told it wasn't an authentic Warhol. There's a wide assortment of opinion on whether or not the artist created the piece; or whether directing an employee in it's creation justifies authenticity. Lawsuits ensued and a number of collectors have been stuck holding the bag to the tune of millions of dollars in art or lawsuits (or both).

Although Prince (and Bob) may be suspect here, more than anything, I find it hard to believe that the Gagosian would gamble with their reputation within the art & collecting community (not to mention their financial welfare) by representing works that are created to purposely defraud collectors/investors. It would be a massively stupid move. Also, representing an artist and requiring them to sign a release would not exonerate the gallery from financial liability. It would also be impossible for them to procure insurance. IMO, Gagosian, more than anyone (besides the collecting communitiy) has more at stake than Prince or Dylan.

BTW, I like what I've seen so far. I'd like to find out more about this subject.

I don't have time to comb through the 40-odd posts between people berating each other over who's berating whom, so I'm just going to respond to this directly. I read the article theorizing that Richard Prince was behind both this latest installation and the previous one credited to "Bob Dylan" at the Gagosian. It's a fascinating read. The Art World is so bizarrely out of touch with anything resembling reality that it's difficult for those of us who live out here in Nowheresville to even care, let alone form an educated opinion. I saw most of the magazine covers from the latest show, and they don't have much of an effect on me, but then, I'm not their target audience, am I? Whether Bob had anything at all to do with creating them or not, they exist as some sort of post-post-modern meta-commentary on something-or-other that is beyond the concern of 99.9% of us.

Compared to an album or even a single concert, these "works of art" have almost zero significance in the scheme of things. That's actually good to know, since they appear to be really terrible, something that most certainly cannot be said of Tempest. If the Bob Dylan Art Thing is actually a big put-on, all the better, I say. Bob gets to have a laugh, a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals get to ruffle their feathers, and some guy named Richard Prince gets to add a few more zeroes to the end of his already perversely large income. Good for him.

Joined: Wed April 27th, 2011, 03:44 GMTPosts: 7568Location: the home for teenage dirt

Responding to the post by Boston:

Although the Warhol problem deals with whether or not work executed by an artist's assistants, based on the creation and plans for execution by the artist, are fraudulent, it's interesting but not really applicable to why Prince is in legal hot water. Many artists use studio assistants to 'build' or 'execute' work they have made the conceptual framework for, sketched out and specified the dimensions and materials to be used, and oversee the execution of the work. Sculptors like Richard Serra, Claes Oldenberg and Jeff Koons have used assistants (and in many cases metal workers and foundries) to build huge metal sculptures for decades. Koons, like many modern artists, now employs over 120 studio assistants to 'execute' his work, including transferring images to canvas. Koons has stated this gives him the opportunity to make a lot more work and that in his defense, he hires people he knows to work as his studio assistants, which form a 'community', unlike a number of artists who now outsource their work to be 'executed' in China.

Prince's current legal problems about "appropriating" imagery created by another person and incorporating it into his work hark back to the lawsuit Blanch v Koons in which photographer Andrea Blanch sued Koons for using a photograph from a fashion magazine that Blanch had taken that Koons incorporated into a large "collage painting." Koons won the lawsuit by arguing 'transformative' use of Blanch's image, with the court buying his argument because the court believed that Koons had altered the image in color, size and had placed in a context in which it changed the meaning of the image and was used as a 'parody.'

In Cariou v Prince, Richard Prince is accused of copying over 41 photographs from a book that Patrick Cariou published about Rastafarian culture. Prince lost the initial round in court, and I want to quote here from an article about the case from artnet because I like the quote:

In her original decision Judge Batts ruled that Cariou's copyright was infringed because Prince failed to comment on Cariou's photos, saying that Prince didn't 'really have a message' and has 'no interest in the original meaning of the photographs he uses.'

This finding is answered with an argument that seems to come straight out of postmodernist picture theory i.e., that Prince, as an artist, should not be required to give the final word on his own artworks. Prince's 'reluctance to impute a definitive artistic meaning is consonant with the core postmodern belief that that an artist's intent is irrelevant because an artwork's meaning is manifold, malleable, and does not have one single meaning in the eye of the viewer,' according to the brief."

I do not understand why some people want that Bob to stop doing something..

I do. Stop doing something you can't do in a professional manner any more (sing live), or never could do that well in the first place (paint, manufacture 'art') and put out another autobiography, even if it does mean lifting lines wholesale from famous writers and barely known travel writers.

...OR we could express a modicum of gratitude for the half century of music he's given us and say the guy should do whatever makes him happy.

Last edited by Warren Peace on Sun December 9th, 2012, 19:32 GMT, edited 1 time in total.

I posted the Warhol article only as a point of reference for what can happen when facts are hidden and culpability is sought and deflected. I don't think both of these cases are the same; they're not. However, both have a common thread if it's discovered that what's been alleged is true - a blatant & ethical ambiguity of the true artist at the expense of everyone else. Even now, experts don't agree on certain points of both cases (as we know Prince's case is under appeal and Warhol's investors continue to sue).

My points on Gagosian are a different kettle of fish all together but all of them are valid.

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